This is what victory in Iraq and nation building looks like. Well done Dick Cheney and the Neocon establishment. John McCain is proud.

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Yes, a lot of neoliberals were on board as well. Dems who supported the attack on Iraq included John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Joe Lieberman . . . The list is a long one. Dems who supported the war after it started is even longer.

So there's that.

But for me, the most striking aspect of this Tweet about Iraq showing the destruction of Iraq?

A Kurdish marksman looks over a destroyed area of Kobani on Friday, January 30, after the city has been liberated from the ISIS militant group. The Syrian city also known as Ayn al-Arab, had been under assault by ISIS since mid-September.

The way that tragedy and War Crime was ignored by western feminists was appalling.

And it was ignored.

We covered it here, Jane Fonda covered it in a speech, but if you look at the bulk of women who identify as feminists in North America, you will see very little content produced.

A 14-year-old girl was observed by US troops. They plotted how to break into her home and to gang rape her and then to pin the violence on 'militants.' They gang-raped her while her parents and her younger sister were shot dead in the next room.

They almost got away with it.

This was a War Crime and it's appalling how little the issue mattered -- how little Abeer mattered -- to western feminists.

Again, this is an ongoing, global conversation among feminists. TakeDownMRAs is not a feminist group. A group of men who are feminists wouldn't doctor a Rosie image to advance themselves. And it takes the War Hawk lovers to get offended about Iraq being raised.

They didn't care about Iraq in real time and they don't care about the destruction the west has caused to Iraq today.

I was making that same journey from well to terminal, and yet in all my time in Iraq I would see the oil itself only once. This was in a particularly empty patch of desert, beyond even the lonely cinder-block houses and the rock-throwing kids. We had sped past dry concrete canals and abandoned oil drums and rocket-charred tanks, past mile upon mile of flat dirt and rust, and then we found ourselves driving between a series of mirror-black ponds. These pools crept along both sides of the highway, and through the scratchy ballistic glass of our SUV it was hard to tell at first if the liquid within was oil or water. There were no ripples, though—the pools were thick—and the hot asphalt smell was strong enough that it had become a taste. Sam said the oil came from leaky pipes, that there is no EPA watching over Rumaila. “You have to give the devil his due here,” he said, meaning Iraq. “On a good day, they export 60,000 to 70,000 barrels an hour. If 500 barrels of crude spill on the ground here, what is that? Not more than a half minute of export.”

"In the Fields of the North/ En los Campos del Norte"A book by David Bacon

"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. . . They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."

-Donald Trump, June 16, 2015

We live in a despicable era of racism and xenophobia, fueled by the anti-immigrant fervor of the Trump regime and abetted by right-wing media forces. Mexican immigrants have borne the brunt of much of this public animus, including countless verbal assaults and some egregious examples of physical violence. Few perpetrators of this hostility recognize the long historical origins of their nativist outpourings. Even fewer realize the deep humanity and the powerful suffering of the Latino farmworkers who have come north to the United States to escape grinding poverty and hunger and try to eke out marginal livings for themselves and their families.

A new bilingual book by David Bacon offers both a dramatic antidote to the deplorable reality of racism and a majestic life-affirming view of these hidden women, men and children. "In the Fields of the North" is a landmark fusion of journalism and documentary photography. Bacon is an accomplished writer and photographer, with a long record of union organizing for the United Farm Workers, the United Electrical Workers, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and others. He has effectively documented the impact of globalization, the degrading conditions of workplaces for many immigrants, the human consequences of migration, the political struggles for workers' and human rights, and many related topics in his books and commentary.

But above all, Bacon is a documentary photographer of extraordinary power, insight and skill. In his introductory comments to the book, he is modest-too modest-about contributing to the long history of socially conscious photography: "I hope my work contributes to this tradition today." I have had the privilege and pleasure of teaching and writing for many years about some of the giant American figures of this tradition, including Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, Ben Shahn, Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, Roy DeCarava and Gordon Parks.